Well, all in all I would have to say I liked it and would generally recommend it to people. But was I crazy about it? No. I’d have to put it squarely in the B- category.
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The good?
The special effects of course. Even though they were pretty spectacular, I often couldn’t tell reality from effect. The exception, looking back, was the floaty scenes in the hotel. Cool thought, and they did a good job for something that’s very difficult to pull off in a believable way, but it still felt setty and wirey to me. Very non-null grav. But I loved the landscape scenes, especially bending Paris in half and the coastal destruction.
The only standout in the acting category was Marion Cotillard. She didn’t have a ton of screen time, but when she was on the screen, she shined. She really played the part of the lovelorn wife very well. Just the right mix of anguish and desire and batshit crazy. Ellen Page did a nice job as well, though I think she was handcuffed by the script.
The core idea itself was well thought out and well executed for the most part. It kept me thinking and even though there were a lot of parallels with The Matrix, I often caught myself thinking beyond the movie into “what ifs”. What would *I* do in that situation? What would *I* build?
The culmination of the movie, with all four levels headed toward one final conclusion was handled about as well as it could be handled. It got long at the end. I think Nolan overplayed his hand a bit, but it handled nicely, with all four levels adding tension to the story.
The action was quite good. I thought they mixed the slo-mo with normal-time sequences to good effect. And it was pretty complex action, especially when it came to the 3- and 4-level immersions at the end. This is clearly Nolan’s strong suit: mixing complicated action in a tense but palatable way for the viewer.
I’m not really sure where to put this. I’m sort of half and half about the very ending, where we’re supposed to wonder whether or not the world Leonardo made it to was real or not. I fully admit that Nolan had to do it. They had talked too much about the creeping doubt Leonardo and his wife experienced not to do it. But still, I felt the manipulation, and that I didn’t quite like.
The not so good?
The initial frame scene was handled in a pretty ham-fisted way. I would actually have preferred it if he were finishing up a completely different, unrelated job, and then Watanabe approaches him afterward. Telegraphing the fact that Watanabe was going to be in limbo for fifty years really sapped the tension and the emotion for me at the end. Had we simply thought that they were gone, not knowing if they would ever return, and then Leonardo finds and saves him at the end, I would have been much more on the edge of my seat with respect to how the movie would end.
The exposition. I really, really didn’t like the way the elements of inception were discussed. It could have been much more organic, much more natural than the way it was presented to the viewer. The “limbo” and “kick” scenes stick out, but there were a lot of things just like them where they put the movie on hold for a minute or so while they told you about an element of the story.
The acting. I’ve come to like Leonardo a lot, and really many of actors in the movie, but the script did not allow them much freedom, and Nolan has to shoulder some of the blame here. They all felt wooden at certain points, especially (and sadly) Ken Watanabe and Leonardo and Ellen Page. The worst of the bunch was Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I know he’s been a stage actor for a while after his stint on Third Rock from the Sun, and it showed. He was either overacting or emotionless. Surely this second option was at Nolan’s direction, and probably necessary given the other option was too much expression, something that’s necessary on a Broadway stage. Tom Beringer also gets a big thumbs-down.
A special rasberry has to go out to makeup. Ken Watanabe looked horrible as an old man. They couldn’t have borrowed the technology from Benjamin Button?
